See Artist Aleah Chapin's Gripping Interpretation of the Nude Female Form

Last year, portraitist Aleah Chapin became the first American female artist—and one of the youngest artists ever—to win the prestigious BP Portrait Award for "Auntie," her sensitive, larger-than-life rendering of a family friend. Through this Sunday, you can see a group of Chapin's paintings of her "aunties" on display at the New York Academy of Art's 2013 Postgraduate Fellows exhibition (for free!). The next venue for Chapin's work will be London's Flowers Gallery, in fall 2014, so now is the moment to take in her prize-winning work stateside.

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As a graduate student and then postgraduate fellow at the Academy, Chapin, 27, who counts Jenny Saville and Andrew Wyeth as well as photographers Sally Mann and Emmet Gowin among her inspirations, decided to paint women from her home of Whidbey Island, Washington. These are the women she knows and loves best and she paid homage to them "in the most honest way that I can," she said. These intimate, arrestingly realistic oil-on-canvas nudes focus on the shapes and patterns the women's bodies create as they interact and the emotions their movements convey. As a result, each gives voice to the personal histories its subjects share, from past pains and scars to moments of childlike happiness. The feelings that words so often fail to describe—better expressed by a beatific smile, a cackle, a scream, or something in between—are precisely what Chapin captures.

When staging shoots for the photographs she paints from, Chapin noted that she doesn't like to give her subjects, which include the aunties' daughters in her own generation as well, too much direction. "I really want it to come from them, and their emotion, and their mood on that day, and how they're reacting to the environment and each other," the artist explained. "I want it to come naturally because I want that life, that real, unexpected, in-between emotion, moments that are not forced and not staged."

Given the attention her portraits have received, that approach works wonderfully well. An uncommon vulnerability is precisely what makes Chapin's work shine so brightly.

The 2013 Postgraduate Fellows Exhibition, New York Academy of Art, 111 Franklin Street, New York, NY will be on view through September29 from 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. daily (closed Wednesdays).